Standing ovation in Nyamirambo

Because I tend to hang out in Nyamirambo quite often, the assumption by many of my friends is that I am now a moving encyclopedia on this Kigali city suburb, famed for oozing the essence of something straight out of Downtown Kampala, UG. The other assumption, which is quite misplaced, is that whenever I step onto Nyairambo tarmac, I receive a spontaneous standing ovation from all the true ghetto soldiers and hot steppers and urban hustlers and deal and dream chasers that line the hot streets of this urban melting pot. And yes, no talk about Nyamirambo is ever complete without the classical allusion to its close resemblance to the typical Kampala/Ugandan/East African suburban setting. Nyamirambo is also the first mandatory stop for thrill-seeking low-budget tourists and backpackers who are either bored of, or do not see the economic sense in restricting their tour itinerary to only lonely and impersonal 5-Star Kigali. They want a bit of the warmth and the local urban vibe. A backpacker I recently bumped into at a music recording studio in Nyamirambo mentioned being tired of what he termed “white glove tourism in 5-Star Kigali” as the main motivation for his incursion into Nyami-juice. That’s another word I just picked up from there, a sign that indeed this is a hustler town; a turbulent and volatile theater of dreams. For it is only in hustler towns that new words are coined every day in lieu of conventional lingo. Kanda amazi, the title to that filthy but all the same groovy booze anthem by DJ Pius, is an expression whose roots can be traced back to Nyami-juice. I have asked my tight friends in Nyamirambo why their hood is called Nyami-juice of late, and they have given me this expression that seems to show only a daft person does not know the meaning of the new name. Even at a personal level, Nyamirambo seems to have curved out its own, parallel reputation and impression on me. While I may boast a handful of friends that are spread over the various Kigali City suburbs like Kacyiru and Gishushu and Remera and Kicukiro, it has occurred to me that the ones that are less well-behaved tend to hail from Nyamirambo. The last time I made mention of not-so-well-behaved friends, it was about a particular one who had checked on me at home but found I was away to the nearby boutique for some buys. In the roughly eight minutes that it took before I joined him, I found when he had smoked the two remaining sticks of Intore that I had planned to use sparingly. As a man of humble means, one must learn to live frugally and with extreme caution. Not with my friend, however, who hails from Nyamirambo. Finally, Nyamirambo is also the place where thousands of love-struck Ugandan businessmen and mechanics and hustlers are permanently stuck, after making a rare discovery that is a tightly-guarded secret among the Ugandan community here, but that I am privy to because, as usual, my foot is on the ground. Terra firma.